The PowerPoint® Blog

I work with PowerPoint on a daily basis and I am very honored to be a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP. We have a talented team of presentation designers at TLC Creative Services and ThePowerPointBlog is our area to highlight PowerPoint tips, tricks, examples and tutorials. Enjoy! Troy Chollar

PowerPoint has been used for only 3 Billion Minutes…

At CES this weekend Neowin.net shared some statistics it obtained about Office 2010 beta and Office 2007 use (saying data was created from a Dec ’09 beta survey and from Office’s anonymous reporting).

o 41 billion minutes in Outlook
o 31 billion minutes in Word
o 18 billion minutes in Excel
o 3 billion minutes in PowerPoint
o In October 2009, US online PC users spent more time in PowerPoint than in Halo 2 on the PC

Not sure how to quantify the numbers, but they are interesting and amusing. There are some more listed here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:07:46-07:00January 11th, 2010|PowerPoint|

RIP Office 2003

Over the weekend Microsoft officially pulled the plug on sales (and downloads) of Office 2003.

The lawsuit against Microsoft about the use of some XML code in Word has ended distribution of it. Bcause Word cannot be distributed and the Office suite has Word – cannot be distributed (only Word is the program in question). Here is a good summary article about the lawsuit.

Like a good movie trailer for a bad movie, the title is more appealing than the full show. Office 2003 is not really gone, just the current version. An alternate version with the questionable code removed will be in circulation, which should be identical to even the most knowledgeable Word users.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:08:17-07:00January 10th, 2010|PowerPoint|

Trump Did Not Say “You’re Fired!” (Yeah)

One of the Trump University groups needed a new template to consolidate their presentations onto for a consistent and professional look. The entire project went great, although I kept hearing the famous ‘You’re Fired’ running through my head…

The final template that was approved focused on rich-elegant-professional look. Here is the Title and Content slide layouts from the template:

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:08:56-07:00January 7th, 2010|Portfolio, Templates/Assets|

Customizing SmartArt – Shadows

SmartArt is a great solution for converting text to visual elements. For a recent project I modified a simple timeline SmartArt (Closed Chevron Process) with customized drop shadows to add some visual interest to the slide.

All was accomplished by adjusting the shadow distance for each of the 3 elements.

Download the slide here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:10:42-07:00January 5th, 2010|Portfolio, Tutorial|

Mesa Aquatics Web Banner

One of the things that definitely keeps presentation work fresh is a diversity of projects. My daughters are on a swim team together and the president of the swim club asked if I could help with updating some of the website elements, starting with the webpage banner at mesaaquatics.com.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:11:15-07:00January 3rd, 2010|Portfolio|

Picturing The Past 10 Years (as Icons)

Thanks to Suan Ramlet and Echo Swinford for discovering this very cool infographic. It is interesting for several reasons:
– It wraps up the past decade into 12 topics and 120 icons
– It is humorous and also amazing that some things seem like just yesterday, but are actually many years old
– It is a good study in icons, which can be found in lots and lots of presentations

See it here.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:12:08-07:00December 31st, 2009|Resource/Misc|

ThunderCats – The Template!

Always fun to work on projects that allow me to creative license to create something super dynamic. One such project was a PowerPoint template for the upcoming ThunderCats movie.

My first stop was lots of research to familiarize myself with this cartoon series I overlooked in the 80’s. I also watched the trailer for the upcoming movie and reviewed lots of the movie release info. From all this I identified the primary characters – logo – color pallet – and theme. Then I pulled in a number of images and started developing the basis for the template backgrounds in Photoshop. After a number of revisions and input from client the background art was imported into PowerPoint 2007 and all template options set. Here is the final result.

1. Opening Theme Graphic Slide
2. Title Slide
3. Content Slide

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:12:35-07:00December 29th, 2009|Templates/Assets|

PPT 2007 vs. Imported PPT 2003 Tables (part 2)

Working from this slide the goal is to give both an identical look/style (file can be downloaded from previous post).

The template has a few options for tables preset that the imported tables to not automatically have turned on. Until these are manually activated the Table Styles Options will produce different visuals for the charts.

As example, for the sample file the ‘Header’ and ‘Banded Rows’ is active for all new tables by default. But the inserted PPT 2003 tables do not have these options active.

Select the (PPT 2003) table, activate these options and the 2 tables can easily be updated to look identical for a consistent presentation.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:13:03-07:00December 24th, 2009|PowerPoint|

PPT 2007 vs. Imported PPT 2003 Tables (part 1)

Here is a problem. You have a presentation where a number of tables are created and the Table Styles (Table Tools >> Design >> Table Styles) are used to make them look consistent and professional.

I often hear (and was one of people complaining too) that the styles are different for the PPT 2007 vs. the PPT 2003 table.

I have created a sample slide with these 2 tables on it:

Here is a link to download that slide (80K). See if you can make the two tables have an identical style/look using PPT 2007’s very helpful Table Styles. Feel free to use the post comment option to to tell us if you were successful, unsuccessful, or steps to accomplish.

Next post I will show what I check and do to accomplish this.

– Troy @ TLC

By |2016-09-16T09:13:25-07:00December 22nd, 2009|Tutorial|
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